TLC Student Collection Essays

Essays on the TLC Student Collection, by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander

I. The TLC Student Collection: Overview

Pamela Allara

10 July 2020

Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko
“Comfort in Poverty, A Cinderella Story”

The Lockdown Collection’s third group, the Student Collection, was launched on June 23. Like its two predecessors, The Lockdown Collection and the Extension Collection, it consisted of 21 works of art that were posted consecutively. Unlike the previous unique works, however, the student works will be reproduced in a series of 10 limited edition prints each, which will be sold for modest prices. They will be reinterpreted as fine art prints later in the year. Proceeds from the sales will go to the Vulnerable Visual Artists Fund as well as to the student artist themselves, most of whom are studying either at Artist Proof Studio or at the University of Johannesburg.

The twenty-one artworks are evidence once again that South Africa is blessed with tremendous reserves of creative talent. “Student work” usually implies work that is hesitant, awkward, or not fully mature. The work here is assured, highly-competent, and moreover manages to avoid clichés. In addressing the pandemic, the themes of isolation and anxiety persist, as does that of courage and persistence. The motifs used to express those themes include, appropriately enough, single, isolated figures, often women. Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko’s mixed-media “Comfort in Poverty, A Cinderella Story” with an isolated mother lovingly binding her child to her, is a moving depiction of resilience.

 Somewhat unexpectedly, two works in the collection express the theme of isolation and loss through architecture. In “Ghost of the Ordinary,” by Kerry-Leigh Cawrse (BFA candidate, University of Johannesburg), abandoned, crumbling structures loom over the viewer: veritable towers of absence. On the other hand, in “Thresholds,” by Shalom Mushwana (BVA candidate, University of Johannesburg), the two-dimensional abstracted architectural shapes visually prevent our entrance, as we may not visit friends’ spaces during the lockdown.

Monwabisi Boyi
Claws of Contagious

Surprisingly, the coronavirus itself appears in relatively few works, but it makes a frightening appearance in Monwabisi  Boyi’s mixed-media “Claw of Contagious,” where multiple viruses surround an uprais\ed hand covered in a less-than-protective mask, a reminder that the virus can be spread through touch as well as breath. Our inability to touch each other, to comfort each other as Mazibuko’s mother does her child, is one of the most emotionally painful results of the pandemic.

The likely source of the pandemic, the pangolin mammal, surfaces in the Student collection for the first time since its appearance in Thabiso Mohlakoana’s “Ardmore Pangolin Ceramic bowl” and Diane Victor’s smoke drawing “Eating One’s Own Tail--Pangolin” in the initial TLC. The clay and wax ‘vase,’ “Pandora’s Pandemic,,” by Jackie Naidoo (visual art student, University of Johannesburg) has a torso-like shape that is surrounded by pangolins, as well as the gruesome visages of the pandemic’s victims. The infected mammal has unleashed a Pandora’s box of life-threatening illness.

Another motif we might expect to see is that of the essential front-line worker. Thabo Skhosana (a graduate of Artist Proof Studio) avoids the single, heroic portrait that can be found in the initial TLC collection, and instead reminds us that addressing the pandemic requires the efforts of people from all walks of life. His watercolor, “The War Against the Invisible Enemy” includes a member of the military and the police in addition to a nurse, all of whom charge downhill together to battle the pandemic, each person a warrior in a collective army.

One would think that given the breadth of the first two collections, there would be little new left for young artists to say. But the artworks in the Student collection are truly individual interpretations of and imaginative responses to the coronavirus pandemic.  They should provide inspiration to the artists who will submit work to the following Open Call.


II. “The Thing with Feathers:”  Across Shadows and Light in The TLC Student Collection
Mark Auslander

10 July 2020

While grappling with themes brought to the fore by over forty established artists showcased in the initial run of The Lockdown Collection (TLC) and the TLC Extension Collection, the twenty-one younger artists of the Student Collection strike out, in important ways, into new, unexplored territories.

Interior Landscapes: Locked within One’s Mind

Shalom Mushwana
Thresholds

The challenges of social isolation, giving birth to endless rounds of disquieting internal dialogue, are prominent in many of these works. Shalom Mushwana's Thresholds interrogates the wall and door of the artist’s room, to which he has been largely confined for much of the Lockdown. He plays a kind of game with himself,  writing the word “value,” repetitively across the wall. His mind explores the play on words; where precisely rests economic value in our current moment of crisis, when we can buy and sell so little, and what values guide us as we pursue our lives under these radically constrained circumstances?  The chamber becomes a metaphor for the artist’s own interior mental state under Lockdown, as his thoughts return again and again to the same basic puzzle, from which there seems to be no obvious exit.

Cinthia Sifa Binene
Être Femme (To be a Woman)

A rather different room is envisioned in Cinthia Sifa Binene’s “Etre Femme” (To be a Woman).  Her mind returns to the small dwelling space she and her family occupied when she first arrived as a child in South Africa for DRC, where she began to decode gender and sexuality through images glimpsed on television. Two women gaze into mirrors, pondering the nature of beauty, desire, race, and self-worth under conditions of racial and gendered hierarchy. A lighter skinned woman, in a 19th century Belle Epoque bustle dress, contemplates her visage (reflected back with what seem to be more African features)  in a dresser under the watchful eye of a male portrait bust, perhaps evocative of the ever present patriarchal gaze  A much darker skinned woman contemplates herself in a hand mirror; she may be more comfortable in her own blackness, but the imposed image of a cow on her midriff perhaps signals that as a woman she remains confined by a system that still often reckons female worth in terms of lobola marriage payments. Whatever the precise meanings at play, the work highlights the internal psychic drama and self questioning that unfold under Lockdown conditions, as we go traveling within the palace of our memories.

Lungile Mbelle
Conversations with Myself

Lungile Mbelle’s Conversations with Myself, in turn, highlights the painful, even anguished interior mindscapes of the crisis. Two disembodied self-portrait heads of the artist face one another. The left head has eyes blinded by newspaper reports and seems to scream; the right one has open eyes but refrains from speech. All of us long for the life-affirming joys of exchange and reciprocity with others, which are so highly restricted under Lockdown, but the loss of such mutuality is especially painful for young adults, who largely come to figure out in their teens and twenties who they are  through the constant traffic of social interaction with peers. Pictographs of sun and moon, which under other circumstances would evoke complementary interdependence, hover around Mbelle’s two heads, as if to remind us how difficult psychic integration is to achieve under conditions of confinement, when we can give and receive so little to and from other persons.

Ralarno Coutts
Untitled

Ralarno Coutts’ Untitled, in turn, shows a youthful figure pursuing the solitary pleasures of drinking and smoking, now largely prohibited to the great majority under governmental restrictions. A 4th year student at UJ, much of his work engages with issues of “invisible identity” in reference to his own mixed race or “Coloured community.”  As in this work, he tends to blur or obscure the faces of those who act in a stereotyped manner.  During the pandemic and Lockdown, so much energy and thought must be directed in low income households, to attaining the material essentials of survival that even zoning out has become a scarce resource. 

The travels of the confined mind are chronicled in quite different register in Jesse Shepstone’s artist’s book “As many as cars.” While stuck at home, the artist photographs 500 cars speeding by (ostensibly on essential errands, although one suspects this is often not the case!)  Automobiles are endlessly evocative“vehicles” of memory, summoning up reminiscences of times past and paths not taken. This collection of cars whizzing by. taken from the vantage point of confinement, thus takes us on a kind of journey through the artist’s own mind, darting hither and fro, highlighting the contrast between the physical reality of stasis and the mind’s endless capacity to heed the siren song of the open road.

Kerry-Leigh Cawrse
Ghost of the Ordinary

This dialectic between the internal and external landscapes of isolation and desire is further explored in Kerry-Leigh Cawrse’s “Ghost of the Ordinary;” The artist photographs abandoned houses in stark black and white, spaces haunted by those who once dwelled in them, silent monuments to a lost world of social proximity. Each of the three images is centered on prominent diagonal forms, a shadow in the left, and jutting beams in the center and right frames. One senses the distant traces of an arm held out, seeking another, alas without any hope of a reciprocated gesture of acknowledgement. Cowrie’s ghosts, one suspects, are not only the former inhabitants of these decaying structures, but the specters of our recent selves, who hold the body memories of touch and closeness which now must discipline ourselves every day to avoid. It is up to all of us to rebuild a new social world on the ruins of the old, balancing the need for health with the imperatives of retaining and refashioning that which makes us human.

Michael Vickers
Internalized: Wilderness Series

In a comparable vein, Michael Vickers’s “internalized: Wilderness Series,” presents the Lockdown period as a liminal space, betwixt and between conventional times and places. Like the Israelites wandering in the desert for 40 years, we are being remade through this passage, in ways we cannot yet fully imagine or understand, Vickers’ landscape may evoke the No Man’s Lands of World War One, muddied fields of death and desperation between trenches. Yet from this darkened wild land, an evident projection of the artist’s own mind, emerge outlined self-portraits of the artist, one gazing skyward. We do not quite know what awaits, but we have seen, or are just about to see, the Promised Land.

A different internal mental journey through our strange time is presented in Thulani Gancka’s Dark or Blue. A pensive woman makes her way through a cityscape that seems to be the projection of her own interior thoughts. We see the in the middle foreground foliage and a township and the background the skyline of central Johannesburg, a site of dreams for so many millions. Here an interesting parallel to Vickers: the Hillbrow Tower, symbol of the city, which seems to touch the sky. Like Vicker’s upturned head etched in the sky the spire evokes the subject’s longing for the Infinite, unconstrained by current circumstances here on the ground we trod.

Gancka’s dignified woman may be pregnant, mindful of the challenges faced by the life yet to come during this time of unparalleled biological and medical crisis. To her left we see a strange floating shape perhaps evocative of dividing cells within the womb, or the replicating spread of the viral pathogen.  Our overall impression is of quiet determination, as she makes her way within the looming metropolis, ready to face whatever dangers lie ahed.

Keneiloe-Mpho Mazibuko’s “Comfort in Poverty: A Cinderella Story,” also presents a woman of color, now tenderly holding her infant child, with whom she exchanges a loving glance. There may be traces of the classic motif of Madonna and Child, for this is certainly a time when millions are being told there is no room at the inn. Under Lockdown, for some unfathomable reason, children are prohibited from being brought into township stories, posing impossible burdens on impoverished parents and caregivers. Even a few precious moments outdoors, which every parent and child should be allowed to cherish, is forbidden. Mother and child are bound together by bright cloth and their shared gaze, but even those bonds might be sundered at any moment: they are in that sense evocative of the entire predicament of the South African poor, whose basic connections with one another tremble on the brink.

An alternate, rather comic view of the isolation of our moment is presented in  Rhengu Keith Maluleke’s “On It,” A young masked woman, clothed only in the papers of a school science and technology textbook, sits demurely on a toilet. Her hair is wrapped in curlers made of toilet tissue rolls, a scarce commodity under the present supply chain blockages. Presumably, the textbook pages provides alternate means of self cleaning under these difficult circumstances.  (The title might playfully suggest as well the improvisational ingenuity called for at the current challenging moment: “I’m on it.” ) The image can certainly be read as voyeuristic, which may be precisely the point: during Lockdown, when social interaction is so limited, one’s primary companions may well be those fantasized about in private (especially, it would appear, when on the privy!)

Frans Thoka
Malapa Ga A Lekane

Toilet paper also features in a more desperate vision of the current situation, in Frans Thoka’s “Malapa Ga A Lekane” (sePedi: Families are not of equal status). On a prison blanket, redolent of the precarious conditions of confinement during Lockdown, the title phase is written on a chalkboard, in front of a toilet paper roll mounted like a trophy, a critique of those who selfishly hoard such an essential commodity during hard times.

Another folded-in vision of separation and anxiety confronts us in Monwabisi Boyi’s The Claw of Contagious. A large hand, which we are so often admonished is a dangerous vector of contagion, is wearing a mask, which in principle should offer protection, although the dangers of the lurking virus fill the entire visual field. Our own hand,  which ought to be our instrument of joyous, productive self-extension into the world, is now turned against us during the crisis, becoming a claw that confronts us. We see no trace of a face, no promise of kindness, only signs of prohibition: no drinking, no smoking.  Our own hand is masked, but how can we protect ourselves from our own limb? We are truly on our own.

Angelique Bougaard
 Covid Warrior.

A rather different, solitary hand is explored in Angelique Bougaard’s graceful Covid Warrior.  A sculpted left hand, made of soap and blood, lightly touches the handle of a metal pail, filled with water. We are reminded of the millions who lack indoor plumbing and access to soap and clean water, the frontline defenses against the novel coronavirus. The work celebrates the uncompensated labor of millions of African women, who carry water and perform so many other vital households for the domestic tasks, often under conditions of great risk and isolation, all of which have been exponentially increased by the pandemic. Bougaard beautifully evokes the aesthetics of everyday life in townships and rural areas, in which even the basic tasks of lifting or setting down a bucket of life-giving water are infused with a deep sense of restrained balance and the cultural principles of respect, caring, and dignity.  Her ethereal hand arcs over the precious pail of life-sustaining water, almost as if blessing it, or distilling its liquid essence into translucent form. In a land of great suffering, nobility of spirit endures, and unsung women laborers and worshipers continue to quench the parched bodies and souls of those in need.

Clement Mohale
Unprecedented Times

Perhaps the collection’s most heart-wrenching image of isolation is Clement Mohale’s Unprecedented Times. An emaciated young woman offers a capsule or pill to a man whose swollen spiked green head is that of the feared coronavirus. She may be proposing a cure or seeking to propitiate the faceless monster who does not return her gaze. Behind her looks on another male figure, whose head is a locked safe, a reminder of the implacable Lockdown. In the distance, we see the back of men, whose path is blocked by a sign warning of Covid-19.  Once again, the most basic foundations of social life, the exchange of looks and of kindness, are closed off to the subject, who bravely puts out a hand to an alien being, knowing that her gesture may never be reciprocated.

Moving Up, Moving On

None of these 21 artists entirely give into despair. Many exhibit a quiet optimism, even a sense of humor, infused with a sober awareness of the stony road ahead. Jason Langa’s Umbila, like  Thulani Gancka’s Dark or Blue, shows a solitary woman, albeit one who is broadly smiling, refusing to be beaten down by the crisis. Although the title evokes the produce (“mealies” or maize) which she ordinarily hawks in the Central Business District or the township, the metal bowl on her head is now filled with the essential commodities of our viral era, disinfectants, gloves, masks,and toilet paper. The resilience shown by African women on the Rand for well over a century, make their improvisatory way through the city, is proudly celebrated.

Khosi Kunene’s “19” directly confronts the current landscape of mass loss, referenced by an enormous skull emerging out of winding tree, free of foliage, with branches figured as outstretched arms. The uncanny shapes evokes the early modern Danse Macabre, reminder of the omnipresence of Death at times of plague. Yet, in the sprit of William Kentridge’s Shadow Procession and More Sweetly Plays the Dance, this is not a choreography only of suffering, but one filled with joy and energy, moving forward against all odds. The capacious skull is open at the back, showing a vibrant, active brain.  Here we see a young mind at play, waiting, as the artist writes in her accompanying poem, to help fill in the empty spaces of present time with the flowers of our imagination.

Samukelo Gqola
Culture Respecting President

Another  forward-facing procession is presented powerfully in Samukelo Gqola’s
Culture Respecting President. The struggle against Covid-19 is cast in terms of a Xhosa male initiation camp. Elders wearing masks escort two initiates, who are depicted as potent birds of prey, who brandish fighting sticks adorned with face masks. Perhaps the birds are far-seeing bateleur eagles (isiXhosa:  ingqanga), which can at time prophesies disaster and calamity, and which are famously celebrated as the stone birds of Great Zimbabwe.  “Culture” in this vision, encapsulated by initiation, becomes a vital partner in the national effort against the pandemic. As in Michael Vickers’ Wilderness Series, the current crisis is presented as a liminal zone, a place out of normal space and time, through which the initiates, like all of us, will emerge transformed, returning to the regular world, where everything is the same, and yet where everything is somehow different.

Optimism and wordplay also informs Tebogo Stephen Langa’s “We Went Viral”. A young man wearing a mask is seen in profile. Under the masked mouth we read a handwritten message, “We went viral around the world.”   South African artists, through the TLC and other projects, have spread their message internationally, going ‘viral’ in the positive sense.  The artist’s mouth may be obscured by the mask, but his words are still widely broadcast.

Tusevo Landu
Covid-19 Olympics

Tusevo Landu’s Covid-19 Olympics, in turn, wryly portrays the global struggle against Covid-19 , including the rivalrous struggle for a vaccine, as an Olympic competition. Within the familiar five rings of the Olympic banner, we hold various scenes from the global crisis, including lists of dreadful statistics, injunctions to behave safely, and a young person’s body being wrapped in a body bag.  A snarling hyena seems to be a stand in for the disease, into which a syringe, perhaps containing the hoped for vaccine, is being injected. Presiding over the scene is a Kongo nkisi nkondi, a nail-studded power figure use in Central Africa ritual systems to enforce oath and promote righteous behavior, backed by the power of the ancestors themselves. The nkisi declares, both humorously and seriously (perhaps channeling Mr. T from the A Team) “Wear your mask, fool!”

Thabo Skhosana
War against the invisible enemy

A less jaundiced view of collective unity is presented in Thabo Skhosana’s “War against the invisible enemy". Drawing on the aesthetics of manga and anime, the artist presents the entire nation in a united front,  an army led by a young woman medical workers, flanked by an armored South African Police officer, a machine gun toting infantryman, and others, bravely traversing the fog of battle. As in the Avengers and other superhero dramas, the protagonists are melded in a virtual family, bound indissolubly to one another.

Cynics might note that the image is rather a fantasy. The actual experience of the pandemic and of the Lockdown, as so many of these artists have noted, is hardly co-equal for the great majority of South African impoverished communities of color, whose already marginal life struggles are rendered even more precarious by disease, hunger, and legal restrictions.  The police are more often experienced by the urban and rural power as agents of oppression, capriciously imposing Lockdown regulations on the less privileged. Yet this is nonetheless a delightful, exuberant fantasy that should be valued on its own terms: as for so many of the young artists, the Lockdown has given Skhosana’s mind a chance to revel in imagination, summoning up not simply the world as it is, but, through art, a world as it ought to be.

Jackie Naidoo
Pandora's Pandemic

Finally, I am captivated by Jackie Naidoo’s Pandora’s Pandemic, a modern rendition of the classical legend of Pandora’s Box. The structure is surrounded by pangolins, anomalous scaled mammals that are honored as vessels of divinity in many indigenous African societies.  As has been widely reported, pangolins may have served as transitional repositories for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as it jumped. probably from bats, to its human hosts, picking up sequences of RNA that now help hijack human cells as the virus proliferates. The most trafficked mammals on the planet, pangolins are poignant reminders of the long legacy of environmental abuse, including deforestation and human intrusion into previously wild reserves, that may have released waves of viral contagion across species.

Pandora’s all too human curiousity, the legend remind us, launched all manner of horrors and plagues upon humankind. But one most important element remained within the box, hope itself, that which sustains us in our darkest hour. Naidoo’s compelling ceramic work glows from within, redolent both of the terrifying forge of the pandemic, but also of the inextinguishable flame of hope in our time of trial.  Gazing into her enigmatic column of energy, I find myself thinking of Emily Dickinson’s beloved lines,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

The TLC project was initiated on the evening the Lockdown began with William Kentridge’s founding gift, a flowering tree that posed the vital question of our era, “Where shall we place our hope?” This is perhaps the oldest of human interrogatives, hearkening back to the 121st psalm, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.”  Our eyes lift up, but will succor ever come?  Where shall we place our hope? Now, through the pens, brushes, hands, camera lenses, and digital magic of these 21 remarkable young artists, we have a answer to Kentridge’s challenge. We do indeed have somewhere to place our hope: in the young artists of this new generation, who, amidst great suffering and loss, sing an incessant tune of creativity and courage—calling, against the odds, a new and better world into being.

Covid Warrior: Angelique Bougaard

Angelique Bougaard
Covid warrior
Medium: Mixed Media Sculpture (Soap and blood) 9. 5cm x 9. 5cm x 14.5mm
(encased in glass box)
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: Attached to the handle of a metal pail is a sculpture of a left hand, composed of soap and blood

Artist's Statement: During this time of struggle each person is a warrior in their own capacity, in remote villages and townships access to water and sanitation is limited and scarce. My artwork attempts to highlight this battle to attain water which assists to combat the virus and support basic needs. The hand is made from soap and blood which symbolically addresses the fight for survival and access to sanitation while recognising the power and strength of the people affected.

Mark Auslander: The complex symbolism of water has been a long-running fascination for social anthropologists of southern Africa, dating back at least to Mrs. Hoernlé's classic 1923 essay on the social value of water.  In Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, Jean Comaroff unpacks the remarkable ritual capacities of water as a "universal solvent," in precolonial Tswana cosmology and in the religious practice of modern independent Zionism; water breaks down categorical oppositions embedded in all manner of elements (flesh/spirit, male/female, living/dead, past/future) and allows in ritual contexts for their creative recombination and integration at higher levels of experience.  In Revelation and Revolution, in turn,  Jean and John Comaroff explore early material and semiotic struggles over wells, irrigation, and rain calling rites in 19th century social fields, as Tswana leaders and British non conformist missionaries contested and negotiated power and agency on the rapidly changing South African frontier.  Water is life and water is spirit, but who controls the flows of water, and of spirit. is invariably a matter of the greatest political import.

In Angelique Bougaard's assemblage, an ethereal hand arcs over the precious pail of life-sustaining water, almost as if blessing it, or distilling its liquid essence into translucent form. In a land of great suffering, nobility of spirit endures, and unsung women laborers and worshipers continue to quench the parched bodies and souls of those in need.

Several other TLC featured artists have concentrated on the image of the hand, either gloved or ungloved, as an instrument of compassion and care or harbinger of encroaching infection, Bougaard's solitary left hand, gently grasping a water pail handle, evokes the labor of millions of people, primarily women, who carry water, often at great risk to themselves, daily in townships and rural communities that lack indoor plumbing. They are themselves essential workers, warriors in the artist's terms, even if they are rarely spoken of as such. Uncompensated or under-compensated women's labor remains at the foundation of African economies (and arguably all economies everywhere), and this vast reservoir of vital, yet undervalued, work is honored though the light-bathed hand, just about to lift up the burden of the life-giving liquid.

The deep inequality of the modern experience of Lockdown is emphasized by the carving of a hand out of soap and blood. Soap, necessary for the hand-washing that is the first line of defense against the virus. Blood, coughed out of the lungs by this dreaded pulmonary disease, which disproportionately impacts low income people of color.

Yet Bougaard does not confine herself to denouncing injustice. The floating hand, almost spectral, is oddly beautiful, an occasion of grace, as it hovers radiantly above the reflective surface of water. And this is entirely appropriate, for a remarkable feature of township worlds, in Zolani Ngwane's terms, is that everyday life is realized as an aesthetic project. There is a complex, elegant choreography to the basic labor processes on which life depends, the hauling of water and produce and charcoal, the preparation of food,  and the bathing in water of newborn infants and of the dead.

This hand is frozen in time, but it is not static; it is poised in a moment to resume its daily rounds, bringing water and all of the other necessities of life, spirit, and  love--even, especially, in our dessicated era.


References
Comaroff, Jean. 1985 Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Comaroff, Jean and John. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution. Volume 1. Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hoernlé, Mrs. R.F.A. (July 1923). "The Expression of the Social Value of Water among the Naman of South-West Africa". South African Journal of Science. 20: 514–526

Covid-19 Olympics: Tusevo Landu

Tusevo Landu
Covid-19 Olympics
Charcoal mixed media on fabriano
TLC Student Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: The five multi-colored  rings of the International Olympic Movement are arrayed over a grayish background filled with images of the novel coronavirus. Each ring contains figures or images evocative of the pandemic and lockdown, including a pointed hand ""Stay Home") a monstrous snarling beast being injected, huddled figures reading various pronouncements, and a figure clad in running shoes perhaps being wrapped in a body bag, The top center ring show Kongo power figurine or nkisi nkondi, into which nails have been ritually pounded. surrounded by statistics on worldwide cases and deaths from the pandemic. The figurine asks, "Where is your mask, fool?"

Artist's Statement: In this work, I express the impact of the Corona Virus in our lives, across the world, how the outbreak has become a global competition where nations are in search of the cure
or vaccine. I have used the Olympics symbol to globalise these concepts, to be more satirical about the year 2020. This year was supposed to be the year where the Olympics would take place, but we are witnessing the opposite. To me this seems so hilarious and pathetic because there are
people going through tremendous breakdowns during this lockdown; retrenchments are happening, mental illness playing a role as well, people have lost their loved ones and families are torn apart. What will happen post-pandemic?

Mark Auslander:  As John Macaloon (1984) notes in his study of the invention of the modern Olympic moment,  Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, sought to distinguish between "patriotism", love of one's country, and "nationalism,"  that is to say adversarial opposition, including viole ce, aimed at other nations and peoples. The Olympics would celebrate the former, through flags and anthems and uniforms, and defuse and defang the latter. The past century has hardly demonstrated the triumph of love over hatred in the international arena,  but de Coubertin's dream still exercises a powerful shared vision for those who believe in the possibility of a common human and humane world, as powerfully imaged in the famous logo of the interlocking rings of humanity.

The Covid-19 crisis has united humanity in the sense of facing a common danger, although it has hardly led to the levels of international cooperation and humanitarian solidarity De Coubertin and his fellow Durkheimians might have hoped for. In many societies, the pandemic has elicited xenophobic responses; this week, the current US administration, seeking to detract for its staggering public health failures, has taken the previously unthinkable step towards withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization. Landus's image of the delayed 2020 Olympics calls into sharp relief both the promise and the failures of the long-cherished dream of global solidarity, as we all wonder if there will be a coordinated response in the search for a vaccine, or if we are facing a biomedical war of all against all.

Allen Roberts suggests that the snarling beast in the lower right circle is a hyena, a widely apprehended witchcraft familiar in the region. Allen further notes that HIV/AIDS in East Africa was at times referred to as "hyena," Perhaps Landu similarly uses this feared creature as a stand in for Covid-19, which at the moment seems entirely untamable. Hence, the hand that advances with syringe towards the animal, holding one presumes the long wished-for vaccine, which would guarantee victory in this global competition.

I am especially intrigued by the nail-studded Kongo nkisi nkondi that presides over the work in the top center ring. Landu moved to South Africa in 2006 from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the nkisi presumably references his own national cultural heritage. Nails pounded into nkisi famously help to enforce oaths and underlying social values, so it is entirely appropriate that the figurine hear admonishes viewers to wear their masks and keep others safe. It is worth noting that nkisi are activated by medicinal substances, including grave soil, and in that sense may be conceived of as powerful mobile graves through which the powers of the Dead watch over and safeguard the living (MacGaffey. 1993). At this time of mass death and loss, we might read the nkisi as speaking on behalf of the Dead, to all of living humanity, exhorting us through the intertwined rings of the  International Olympic movement to heed, at long last, our better angels.

In a recent essay, Allen Roberts (2019) introduces the neologism "interformance" to characterize the performative labor established by and through the nailed nkisi nkondi figurines, which render "extravagantly visible" the vast matrix of invisible spiritual and social relations that converge within and radiate from these power objects,  binding all associated with this form to honor a common pledge. The irresistible spectacle of the nail power figure (an exemplary "technology of enchantment" in Alfred Gell's terms)  takes us into the "inter-", the very heart of things, even as they intensify the "-formance,"the coming into being of a network of previously diffuse intersubjective intentionalities. These objects and their ritual deployment are extreme examples of what Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) long ago termed "symbolic action," the externalization of interior emotional states that take on objective, binding reality in the external world.  Such would such seem to be the case with Landu's forceful nkisi, presiding over the Olympic banner, projecting out the plea to wear our masks to all of humanity, lest we lose all we hold dear.

References

Godfrey Lienhardt. 1961. The Control of Experience: Symbolic Action. Chapter 7 in Divinity and Experience : The Religion of the Dinka. Oxford University Press.

John J. MacAloon,  1984. This Great Symbol: Pierre de Coubertin and the Origins of the Modern Olympic Games. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wyatt MacGaffey. 1993  "The Eyes of Understanding," in Astonishment and Power: The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi and The Art of Renee Stout. (Wyatt MacGaffey and Michael D. Harris Smithsonian. 

Roberts, Allen F. 2019. Interformances of a Kongo Nail Figure, in Striking Iron; The Art of African  Blacksmiths. University of Washington Press. 

Malapa Ga A Lekane: Frans Thoka

Frans Thoka
Malapa Ga A Lekane
Medium: Paint on prison blanket
TLC Student Collection (South Africa 2020)

Overview: On a small chalkboard hanging from a nail, surrounded by a garland of sorts, is written the title phrase "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (sePedi: Families are not of equal status)   A roll of toilet paper hangs on a holder. as it is a trophy. The background is a brown prison blanket, on which a shadow is cast.


Artist's Statement:  Lockdown is the awakening of humanity and realizing that malapa ga a lekane. From the beginning of the lockdown, selo started to matter. Batho ba bantši ga bana mano a go dira tšhelete ya go reka borotho; ga se gore ga ba kgone go nagana. Melapeng e mengwe toilet paper ya lešidi ke bothata. Rena re swanetše ke go thušana mola le mola. Ga se taba ya lockdown fela. Ke nagana gore ge reka tšwela pele ka Botho, reya kgole. Bao ba sa ememego gore maphelo a bona abe kaone, ke
nako ya gore re ithute; re botšiše bao ba kgonago gore ba kgona bjang go reka borotho.

(The artist requests that viewers research how to translate his statement from sePedi.

Mark Auslander:   The title phrase, "Malapa Ga A Lekane" (in sePedi) literally means that families are of different status. It may be used ironically or sarcastically to dismiss those who attempt presumptuously to rise above their station. In this instance, the artist seems to be calling, without irony, for sympathy and aid to those households that are financially on the edge, in need of significant assistance. The chalkboard might be the kind of object that would hang in a classroom (if classrooms were still open), sharing a vital message about economic inequality, revealed and compounded by the Covid-19 crisis.  The toilet tissue roll,  being held as a kind of trophy (like a taxidermy fish) emphasizes how terribly limited resources are being unfairly hoarded. The surrounding garland, perhaps of dried flowers, may be evocative of the legions of dead and dying in this tragic moment.

The surrounding brown background of the prison blanket may signal the fact that under Lockdown the whole nation, especially the impoverished black majority, is in a state of increasingly desperate confinement, a veritable prison. As was true under Apartheid, prisons in modern South Africa remain overwhelmingly associated with impoverishment and precarity; in that sense the low income majority, like the assemblage in the center of Thoka's image, clings to narrow islands as rising threats confront them on every side.

Unprecedented Times: Clement Mohale

Clement Mohale
Unprecedented Times
Mixed Media
(TLC Student Collection, South Africa, 2020)

Overview: A young woman in a blue blouse hold out her palm, bearing a large red and yellow  pill or capsule, to a a male figure, whose bent head is a greenish novel coronavirus. Behind her is another male figure, whose head is a locked safe with a combination lock. In the distance several figures walk through a sparse township street, facing a sign warning "Caution Danger of Covid-19."


Artist's Statement:  My artwork represents the unprecedented Covid-19 epidemic
which has left the world at a standstill. The work communicates the awareness and effects of the Coronavirus. These include the limitations of human movement due to the imposed lockdown regulations. Thus, the use of entangled lines in my work represents the impact of emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing based on the changes on the normal daily routines. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty it is unclear as to when a vaccine will be made
available.

Pamela Allara: The three main figures in Mohale’s mixed media work together represent the risks, dangers and desperate hope of the populace during the coronavirus. At the left rear, the tall figure with the head of a safe personifies the lockdown. The safe is filled with fragments of bodies, exemplifying the lockdown’s resulting widespread claustrophobia. At the center is a thin, anxious woman, who holds a pill in her extended hand. Ignoring the lockdown, she has ventured outdoors to directly confront the virus, who inspects her offering. This confrontation is a scene of desperation. When one is seriously ill, one is willing to try anything that might offer a cure, or even some relief. The woman awaits the coronavirus’ verdict, as does society as a whole. 

David Coplan:  Is the corona-headed figure the virus or someone who has it? Is the pill a cure, and if so for whom? An offering or a question? And the box camera headed figure? Voyeuristic documentation of futility?

When days are dark, friends are few.

Mark Auslander: In "The Aesthetic Significance of the Face," sociologist Georg Simmel (1901) famously argues that the complexity of the human face, allowing for intricate mirroring and improvisational modification of the mirrored faces of our interlocutors, highlights the core dialectic of revelation and concealment that is at the heart of human social existence.  We are bound to one another through the mutual exchange of glances and facial expression, yet often deceived precisely by those exchanges. Hence,  Simmel suggests, the enormous importance in the history of art of the face, which while foregrounding the unity of the person, simultaneously summons up all we can know, and cannot know, of our fellow social beings.

Simmel's insights are helpful, I suggest, in unpacking Mohale's enigmatic scene. The invisible enemy of the virus is distinctly faceless, and the restrictions of the Lockdown greatly limit our conventional capacity to engage in face-to-face interaction with others.  We do not know if those whom we encounter in the course of our everyday lives are infectious hosts of the virus, and how risky any interaction with them might be. The general uncertainty of social life is thus enormously increased at this moment of trial.  The two figures who surrounds the young woman emphatically lack the vital feature, the face, through which we normally seek to assess other people's motivations and agendas: one with a large spiked virus head, and the other with the head of a locked safe, redolent of the Lockdown itself.

The young woman presents with an open palm an offered medicinal capsule, perhaps evocative of the hoped-for vaccine, to the monstrous virus-headed male figure, who seems to lower his head to inspect it. Lacking access to recognizable facial features, neither she, nor the viewer, has any way of assessing if the offered gift will be accepted or reciprocated. The looming figure behind her ,with the locked safe in the place of its head, is equally closed to her and to us.

In contrast to the dense heaviness of the foreground figures (drawn as the artist notes with entangled lines evocative of stasis and paralysis) the background scene is striking for its use of negative space. The regular energy, the buzz, the musicality of township life are all palpably absent. Two sparsely drawn male figures, wearing hats and casting long shadows, proceed along a path that is blocked by the sign warning of the disease. we see their backs, but their faces are lost to us as well.  We might see a market woman bearing wares on her head, but her face is distinctly in shadow. The only face we are able to behold is that of the plaintive young woman, avatar for Everyman and Everywoman during the Lockdown, bargaining for her life with a faceless being that emphatically refuses to reciprocate her gaze or extend a hand.  Such is the soul-crushing isolation and anxiety of our current moment.




References

Georg Simmel, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face [1901

Women of Color on the Frontlines: Portraits of Unsung Heroes

This project is a response to the observation that female physicians of color are underrepresented in the art, media, and reporting around the country's response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

Overview
The goal of  Women of Color on the Frontlines: Portraits of Unsung Heroes is to challenge the narrative about who in this country is on the front lines of the fight against COVID 19 by honoring women of color physicians with portraits reflecting their determination, talent and tireless work.  The project works by having women of color physicians from around the country submit photos of themselves in the PPE they don each day and then recruiting local artists who transform these photos into art.  Each portrait is a powerful reminder of the sacrifices these women make daily to serve the communities in which they live and work

A career in medicine is not easy—for many reasons—yet these women choose it. Many of them form the frontline response to the epidemic but yet we do not see their faces in the news, on billboards, or in art honoring both the sacrifices and contributions they make as medical professionals. -Sarah E. Rowan, M.D.Infectious Diseases, Denver, CO


Sarah E. Rowan has created this profoundly important project which now has over 200 photos. I just downloaded over 100 portraits based on some of the photographs.Rowan herself is a physician and artist as well as a mother. She created some of the artworks.
 Here is the rainbow of the United States, we see it here.
 And these women are extraordinary: physicians, many of them mothers, some also artists. Their compelling gazes draw us in.

Dr. Kimberly Turner by Yana Greenstein

I wasn’t surprised when I realized that I had been present in the first four obstetrical cases of Coronavirus at my small, suburban hospital.  When the pandemic started, I knew I was uniquely positioned to handle extra clinical duties, if needed.  My children are almost adults and I have always loved being a busy clinician.  My partners joke about me having a 30-year-old stamina, although I recently turned 56 years old.  One of the many tragedies regarding the national story of Covid-19 is that this deadly virus is hitting populations of color with a vengeance.  I felt in my spirit that God was preparing me, a Black female obstetrical provider, for battle.

Each time my partners announce a new obstetrical case, I cringe while waiting to hear the name of the affected patient, praying that it is not another African American or Hispanic woman.  While performing telemedicine visits with these women, they shared their fears of death, of infecting their babies, and, of being alone for delivery.  They pleaded with me to be there at the moment of their child’s birth because I was the closest person to family they would possibly see.

The previously mentioned situation is not getting much press.  My face, yes, my skin color, is placing me at increased risk of acquiring Covid-19, not only because I am a middle-aged, hypertensive, African American woman, but also because I am an African American medical provider torn between increasing my presence in risky obstetrical situations and keeping myself “distanced” to stay healthy.  The indescribable pull that I feel while answering this new call to duty is stressful and dangerous. 

All patients deserve the best medical team consisting of the most qualified providers who can also provide them the best emotional support during their care. But, the story does not just end there.  All medical providers need to address their unconscious biases to be able to truly listen to these patients and give them what they need regardless of the provider’s race. For now, those of us called to answer this “call to duty” will continue to do our best to provide excellent, compassionate care so let’s listen and welcome the stories from these beautiful physician mothers and record them for our history books."

Kimberly Moran Turner, MD, FACOG is an obstetrician/gynecologist at Johns Hopkins Community Physicians in Columbia, MD.  Dr. Turner has been an attending physician in OB/GYN since 1995.  She is a regular contributor to the Hopkins clinical excellence magazine – CLOSLER (bringing physicians closer to the founder of medicine, William Osler).

 Anna Sabryna

Anna Sabryna By Yana Greenstein

Ruth Chacko

Ruth Chacko by Yana Greenstein

Tara Frederick Howard

 Tara Frederick Howard by Shelly Rowan

 Jacinta Cooper

Jacinta Cooper by Kavitha Ryali

 Jacinta Cooper by Priscilla Sarmiento-Gupana

Shelley RubenYoLo

Shelley RubenYoLo By Sarah Rowan

Susan Platt
These amazing women doctors are all vivid to see, in both the photographs and the paintings inspired by them. Their intense dedication to our ongoing crisis is invisible to the general public, who mainly see statistics and generalizations. Seeing the individual faces of doctors who are serving all over the country is a crucial project to remind us of the real heroes of our crisis. As the statistics on the numbers of people of color contracting and dying from COVID-19 and as the health crisis continues to escalate, these women are dealing with a long term challenge to themselves, their families, and their professions. As so many in this country cavalierly declare that face masks are not necessary and social distancing is so often ignored, the people who are paying for this arrogance are the women we see here. The stay at home orders cannot apply to the people of color who are serving on the front lines.

Nora Vasquez

by Yana Greenstein

Maria A Parekh

Maria A Parekh by Mark Shelton

Melanie Hafford

 Melanie Hafford by Yana Greenstein

The website includes over one hundred women doctors of color and still counting. I will present a few more here. I feel that simply looking at their faces is so moving that little commentary is necessary. 

 by Sarah Rowan

Oluwatomilola Nwoke

 Aparna Raj Parikh by Yana Greenstein

Aparna Raj Parikh

Cristina Ferrari by Sam Eddington

 Cristina Ferrari by Sam Eddington

Madhavi Ryali by Kavitha Ryali

Vidya Mandiyan by Kavitha Ryali

Vidya Mandiyan 

Aditi Chhada by Issis Kelly

Aditi Chhada 

Sherie Khambatta

Sherie Khambatta by Nancy Pendergast

Dr. Arlanna Moshfeghi 

Dr. Arlanna Moshfeghi by Jillian Muntz

Dr. Kathleen Mangunay Pergament by Nancy Prendergast

Dr. Kathleen Mangunay Pergament by Nancy Prendergast

Jyoti Rau 

 Jyoti Rau by Kavitha Ryali

Ravneet Gil

99. Ravneet Gill by Holly McClelland

Mark Auslander: The New York Times reports on a comparable project in New York City, by  Ms. Ava Brown

She terms this the Essential Worker project:  http://ayabrown.com/series/Essential%20Workers

Ms. Brown draws these portrait of frontline essential workers, all women of color, on brown paper, since, she says, as she sees it, "“Black bodies do not need to start from white.”

Both projects appear to emphasize the careful labor drawing images of women of color by hand, as a form of homage to those who have put their lives on the line. It seems to me they share a sensibility with the more explicitly religious Ex Votos imagery found in Latin American and Latino contexts, honoring benefict interventions of the saints through the creation and offering of images, which help to intercede with divine powers. These honored women to be sure are not  venerated'saints' in a formal religious sense, but they are being honored in a profound sense through the everyday intentional labor of image making. In the face of taken for granted American systemic racism, these works of image production and dedication are doing their part to change the 'complexion' of the dominant mass culture of race, image, and power in US society.